The Australian Football League should employ full time umpires

Umpiring in the AFL has become a farce, long have the umpires favoured the home team over in Perth, but with the rules increasingly up the the 'umpires interpretation' we are seeing an increase in incorrect and wrong calls that are not only costing teams games but ruining the game for the fans to watch.

Any sport that expects it's players to be professionals and fans to contribute large amounts of their income on tickets and merchandise should be employing professional officials who are dedicated to making the correct calls 100% of the time.

Even when the AFL back their umpires and say a call was correct we are seeing implicit acknowledgement that the call was in fact wrong when the rules are relaxed the following week.

When questioned about professional umpires the AFL used this weak excuse

“We’ve come through history with umpires having full-time jobs (away from football). The challenge is a lot of those guys are in very high-paid careers. They are well established in those by the time they actually get to the AFL ... there would be guys on the AFL list that would earning upwards of $250,000-$300,000 a year in their day-to-day jobs — you’re asking them to give up a lot to go and umpire full-time,” he told SEN.

Not withstanding the fact that AFL umpires are currently paid around 150,000 + bonuses for a part time role

There are 12.5 million working age people in Australia, roughly 100,000 of them earn over 250k which is 0.8%

There are 31 field umpires on the AFL list we can afford to lose 0.8% of them to make the rest professionals for the betterment of the game as a whole and most importantly for the fans who pay to watch AFL every week.